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It’s hard to describe the profound fukwittery that inspired this particular post, so it will mostly be quotes. The first one is from the aforementioned David Faulkner, leader of Newcastle’s LIb Dem council, who, the Newcastle Chronicle reports, has written a letter to Nick Clegg thusly

A PLEA for help has been made to Nick Clegg as Newcastle faces up to “the toughest four years in its history”.

Well, I beg to fucking differ David, you utter cunt. I would say, if I were looking for the worst years, I’d start around 1939 or so. And take into account things like this

Millie Matthews is one of those people. Now in her 80s, she was 13 in 1941.

When the sirens sounded just after 11pm on the night of 3 May, Millie and around 200 others crammed into the Wilkinson’s shelter, beneath the town’s lemonade factory.

It was Saturday night and music from an accordion filled the shelter.

They couldn’t hear the bombs falling; they didn’t hear the direct hit that crashed through the factory at quarter to 12.

And when the bomb exploded on the floor above them it sent heavy machinery crashing down on the people cowering below.

Ninety six people died there and then; others died later from their injuries.

Like this:

A thought occurs. For the last thirteen years we have lived under – and I do mean under – a horrible state that attempted, and in many cases succeeded, to stick it’s scaly statist tentacles into every last orifice of our private lives.

And during that time, countless of the Labour party’s useful idiots have told us just to put up with it, because the state knows best. We know what is good for you better than you do.

It’s an appalling kind of attitude from my point of view, and ugly habits of mind like this usually take years to break. Now of course, we still live in a horrible state that will attempt, and in many cases succeed, to stick it’s scaly statist tentacles into every last orifice of our private lives.

Only now it’s a Tory state.

And in the possessed minds of the hard core Labour drone, there can be nothing worse than a Tory. So now, every incursion by the state into an arena where it has no business being will be a Tory incursion. Every overreaching bureaucratic asshat poking his nose where it doesn’t belong will be a Tory overreaching bureaucratic asshat.

Every encroachment of civil liberties, every act of violence by the state will be seen as a grotesque insult. Because it is now a Tory state.

Well, welcome to my world.

The habit of blind obedience to the state (by proxy of the party) will be burned away by the all consuming hatred of all things Tory. It’s to much to hope that by the time Labour gets another crack of the whip – let’s not kid ourselves, politics hasn’t changed that much, if at all – the blind obedience to the party will have been likewise erased, because Labour are the only party that hate Tory hard enough. And that won’t change. Fuelled by a vicarious race memory of Thatcher, stoked by professional Common Purpose bullshit artists, that hatred will keep them warm – if not united – through the cold, dark years to come.

But perhaps by the time it comes to pass, some of those idiots will be just that bit less useful.

Like this:

Nothing, it seems, unites the political tribes like a good whine. In the run up to all the evil Tory cuts, this is particularly evident in the reaction to the proposals on child benefit.

Tax breaks for the wealthy are EVIL! Scream the Guardianistas. Cut benefits! Shout the suburban high Tory cliques.

How apposite then, that this sort of cockwaffle should appear in the Graun

Amanda Foley in Pottery Corner, a paint-your-own pottery studio, calculated that her family would lose £35,000 over 16 years, “which when you add it up is an awful lot of money”.

She has three sons: Samuel, three, Joseph, two, and three-week-old Oliver. Foley, a former teacher, said: “I do not work but my husband is a contractor and is well-paid so he will be above the threshold for claiming child benefit. But because I have three very young children it will have a knock-on effect on me.”

She believes the government must rethink its decision. “It is my pocket money and it will affect me because I don’t have any other income – I regarded it as being paid to look after the children. But it does feel that it is my money that is being taken away.“

You’d think, really, that axing a universal benefit for the well off would satisy both camps. Less tax breaks, lower benefit bill.

But no, you see, when they were all screaming about the unfairness of tax breaks for the well off, the Guardianistas meant other well of people, not them.

And when the well off blues called for benefit cuts, they meant other people’s benefits, not theirs!

Surely the single best indicator of the fairness of axing an iniquitous universal benefit – cak handed as the implementation may be – is that self entitled pompous dickwads across the entire political spectrum are joined in unity in a plain chant whinge of “That’s not fair!”.

Pay for your own brats, you whiny douchebags.

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Ian Dent, whom I heavily criticised in my last post (or the automated cut’n’paste bot that claims to be him, it’s hard to tell) took the trouble to leave a reply. It’s long, and it’s largely irrelevant, like his report, you can read the full reply here

I’m mostly concerned with this bit, since the rest was utter cockwaffle, so much so that it would barely pass a Turing Test :

This document, produced by Ian Dent, has been orchestrated so as to stimulate the beginnings of a much needed public debate – to raise questions about decisions currently being made over our future, solely by ICT experts and the European Commission with NO active public debate in a common language.

Bollocks. The way it is framed, and the absolutely appalling way in which it is referenced, your busy swapping between UK and US styles of quotation that makes most of it look like ‘scare quotes’, and your complete misunderstanding of computer science terms of art contribute nothing to any such debate other than confusion.

Take IanPJ for instance, who claims to be trying to track down the EU document that he erroneously believes your quoted text “An ‘object’ in this [computing] context … ” to be drawn from.

The poor sod is convinced that because it’s a quote in a report about the EU that the relevant, sinister documentation must be buried deep within the EU. Had you referenced it, you could have saved him the ghastly heartache of this fruitless search, because it is taken directly from the Wikipedia article on Object Oriented Computing.

That part is double quoted, though unreferenced, and the rest of the time you seem to be using single quotes almost at random.

The phrase ‘Biological Economic Device’ appears to be your coinage, but you’ve put it in single quotes and bold for emphasis. Writing like this encourages the unwary to believe that everything you say is attributable to the EU, when in fact most of it is not.

As an academic is simply impossible that you are not aware of the proper conventions for quoting, referencing and footnoting, so one can only assume that your failure to use them properly here is a purposeful distortion.

We can see the results of that distortion, fielded with the weight of your academic credentials in IanPJ’s behaviour. He has run off completely confused in some paranoid never was fantasy panic.

So no Ian, your report contributes only confusion to any such debate, and I would also point out that the privacy and social implications of technology are being widely debated every single day. You managed to use Google to do most of your research, so how did you miss that ?

And last but not least, Ian

These are technical, complex and largely ‘un-soundbite-able’ issues. So a few references may help readers to investigate for themselves in a more measured and balanced way:

Well yes, Indeed they would, so why have you provided so few in your report ?

FFS

I rarely click on Ian Parker Joseph’s twitter links, he is after all the main reason I felt I couldn’t join the UKLP. He does a great job of illustrating why it’s good that he is no longer the leader today.

This was his tweet :

An idiot, earlier

Good god! Could that be true ? That would be dynamite. Worth a click for once.

Idiotarians

Well no, of course, it isn’t true at all. It’s not even hyperbole, it’s just bullshit. Pure and simple. I can’t be arsed to fisk Ian’s godawful post in its entirety, so lets just pull out the relevant parts. Ian says :

Over the past week, as the result of being passed some high level academic reports in the field of technology and ICT reasearch, I have been doing my homework, researching the claims made in the documents, and looking for corroborating EU documentation.

OMG! So far so shadowy. He was passed some “high level academic reports”, bloody hell! No. He wasn’t. The report that he refers to is in fact on line here which of course just adds to the hilarity when Ian promises to email anyone a copy, and subsequently ‘makes it available’ in a download. How fucking generous of him.

For whatever reason he decides that he doesn’t want you to know that this is a freely available document. Presumably he feels it adds to his mystique. To everyone else, not linking to source is just plain fucking rude.

Citation needed

Enter one Ian Dent, allegedly of Cambridge University, although if that’s true they seriously need to sack the fucker. Ian is quoting from the linked document “Beyond Broadband – The True Cost Of Digital Britain” by the aforesaid Dent.

Here is the money quote from Dent’s ‘report ‘(his emphasis)

In computing terms (where the concept originated), an ‘attribute’ can be defined as: ‘a specification that defines a property of an object, element, or file . . ‘ An ‘object’ in this [computing] context can be defined as: a collection of co-operating objects . . . capable of receiving messages, processing data and sending messages to other objects and can be viewed as an independent ‘machine’ with a distinct role or responsibility . .
This is how each person will become defined within Grid profiling – as an object – a ‘Biological Economic Device’.

Wow, Just Fucking Wow

So Dent here goes from a straightforward definition of a computer science term (a definition which, incidentally, he hasn’t referenced) to suggesting that a phrase he has just made up based on it is how we will all become defined by the EU.

No.

I would recommend against reading Dent’s eleven pages of poorly referenced and clearly delusional word salad, – which contains more than the average Daily Mail’s worth of ‘scare quotes’ – in it’s entirety. It will probably actually make you stupider. But this is just stupid. And for someone who is supposedly a Cambridge academic it is practically unforgivable. No citation, no reference. Not true.

Ian, however is prepared to report this as though it were some kind of hard, verifiable fact, rather than just some paranoid phrase that Dent coins on page 17 of his ridiculous screed.

Since Dent doesn’t cite any document that supports his delusion, perhaps the redoubtable IanPJ can help us out, since he states

(documents are there.. if you can find them)

Wow! Links to them ? No.

Seriously people, do better

I have no love for the EU, it’s a crawling horror of a bureaucracy, largely unelected and almost completely unaccountable, but for fuck’s sake people, shout them down for real things that they actually do, rather than just making shit up.